George F. Kennan : an American life

to 1853. They had been found, Kennan claimed, in a pile of rubbish in what was left of the American legation there. “Secrecy and mystery characterize everything,” Brown had written, of the reign of Nicholas I. “Nothing is made public that is worth knowing.” The Russian government possessed, “in an exquisite degree, the art of worrying a foreign representative without giving him even the consolation of an insult.”

Delighted, Bullitt forwarded Brown’s observations to the State Department as an accurate picture of life in the Soviet Union in 1936: “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.” Kennan saw in them the need to regard Bolshevism, “with all its hullabaloo about revolution,” not as a turning point in history, but as only another milepost in Russia’s “wasteful, painful progress from an obscure origin to an obscure destiny.” Nothing in Brown’s dispatches or in Kennan’s training, however, anticipated the horrors of Stalinism. If the purges continued, he concluded in another study written for Bullitt, “there would be nothing left of the Soviet system of government but rule by a small irresponsible group” whose authority rested only on “bread and circuses” and repressive police power: “in short, fascism.”⁴²

This did not mean, though, that relations with the U.S.S.R. were useless. Bullitt’s “swan song,” in which he warned of the Soviet desire to “kill millions of Americans,” concluded on a wholly different note: “We should neither expect too much, nor despair of getting anything at all.” There is no way to know who drafted which portions, but the recommendations that followed—a patient balancing of competing pressures over a long period of time with a view to producing growth in desired directions—sounded more like Kennan’s methods for achieving physical health and psychological stability than like Bullitt’s emotional volatility:

We should take what we can get when the atmosphere is favorable and do our best to hold on to it when the wind blows the other way. We should remain unimpressed in the face of expansive professions of friendliness and unperturbed in the face of slights and underhand opposition. We should make the weight of our influence felt steadily over a long period of time in the directions which best suit our interests. We should never threaten. We should act and allow the Bolsheviks to draw their own conclusions as to the causes of our acts.

The future of Soviet-American relations would therefore depend chiefly on the United States. “[W]e should guard the reputation of Americans for businesslike efficiency, sincerity, and straightforwardness. We should never send a spy to the Soviet Union. There is no weapon so disarming and effective in relations with the communists as sheer honesty. They know very little about it.”⁴³

Whoever drafted it, the conclusions of Bullitt’s “swan song” anticipated with eerie precision the most famous essay Kennan ever published: his briefly anonymous 1947 “X” article, in Foreign Affairs, on “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”⁴⁴ Bullitt, more than anyone else, launched Kennan on the trajectory that led to that achievement. He gave Kennan his first big break by asking him, on the spur of the moment, to help open the Moscow embassy. He nursed Kennan through a year-long health crisis that, without steady behind-the-scenes support, could easily have ended his career. He consistently praised Kennan’s work in reports to the State Department: Bullitt’s critical personnel assessments spared no other member of the Moscow embassy staff. “Nothing but Mr. Kennan’s health,” he concluded in the last of these, “can prevent him from becoming one of the most valuable officers in the [Foreign] Service.”⁴⁵

Kennan knew what Bullitt had done for him. His generation of Foreign Service officers, he wrote his former boss after his ambassadorship to France was announced in September 1936, had been trying to save themselves “from the comfortable philistinism or the decadent estheticism which are the refuges of most of our older colleagues.” Bullitt had understood and sympathized with these efforts. It would seem “very strange not to have your guidance in the Moscow work—especially for me, who can recall our associations in this work from the very beginning.” The Americans there would “plug along,” but “the last vestiges of the novelty of opening up a new territory are gone. Our work is routine—and no longer adventure.”⁴⁶

SIX

Rediscovering America: 1936–1938

SHORTLY AFTER HIS DECEMBER 1935 TRIP TO TOLSTOY’S HOME AT Yasnaya Polyana—with its unexpected assistance from the GPU and its unanticipated evocations of boyhood winters in Wisconsin—Kennan asked the State Department for permission to return to the United States. He had not been there for over two years, he pointed out, and on that visit he had taken only seventeen days of leave before departing with Bullitt for Moscow. Annelise and Grace would be traveling to America in February: it would be Grace’s first trip there. Moreover, “my wife expects another child to be born in April. I should naturally like to join her soon after the child has been born.”¹

There were legal as well as sentimental reasons for the request. A new law had raised the possibility that children born abroad might be denied American citizenship if one parent lacked that status. Annelise was not yet a citizen, so there was little choice, George recalled, but for her to make the long winter voyage back before the baby arrived, after which “I had to come over and fetch them all back to Russia.” The trip would strain finances, he told Jeanette, but with luck there would be enough “to see Annelise and Grace to the United States and the next youngster into the world. Then we’ll see where we stand.”²

Joan Elisabeth Kennan was born in April at Jeanette’s home in Highland Park, Illinois, and George got there in mid-May. The expanded family vacationed for a few weeks at the Hotchkiss cottage on Pine Lake, just north of Nagawicka—the family compound there had long since been sold. George read Charles Beard’s The Open Door at Home, listened to radio coverage of the Republican national convention, and wrote a letter to Bullitt “wishing that there were another opportunity—just at this time—for one of those high and wide discussions which we have had on only too rare occasions.” What he wanted to talk about, though, was not Russia, but America.

The journey home, Kennan reported, had been a reintroduction to capitalism, of which he had seen little recently except Norway and Austria, which had been too idyllic and too depressing, respectively, to be representative. Germany, as he passed through it, had been a “great garden, well-kept and blooming, . . . populated by clean and healthy people.” London had been full of business activity but striking for its social stability: he had forgotten that such a thing existed. So “I got back to this country almost a complete convert to the horrors of capitalism, ready to forgive even radio advertising, . . . and the Saturday Evening Post.”

Once home, however, his optimism began to fade. He acknowledged the high living standard, the political liberties, the freedom of expression. But there was also chaotic municipal growth, an increasingly spoiled countryside, and an absence of public regulation, all of which left “little for the future but retrogression.”

It seems to me that this country doesn’t want government.... It will suffer unlimited injustices and infringements on liberty from irresponsible private groups, but none from a responsible governing agency. Its people would rather go down individually, with quixotic courage, before the destructive agencies of uncontrolled industrialism—like Ethiopian tribesmen before Italian gas attacks—than submit to the discipline necessary for any effective resistance.

Geography insulated the United States from the international consequences of ineffectiveness, but “no oceans can spare us the internal consequences.” Only “strong central power (far stronger than the present constitution would allow)” could rescue individuals from economic hardship and social injustice. “And I’m afraid that’s what’s