“I feel that I am ripe for a transfer,” Kennan confessed wearily at the end of this December 1936 letter to Jeanette. For in addition to the hardships of life in Moscow, he and his colleagues were developing “a doctrinaire skepticism which cannot be a good thing. We know so thoroughly the limitations of our job that it seems hard to see its possibilities.... [W]e have the psychology of old men.” The time had come to turn things over to people “whose experience is less and whose enthusiasm is greater. It will do us all good.”11
II.
That opportunity came quickly enough. Bullitt’s successor, Joseph E. Davies, arrived on January 19, 1937, with ample enthusiasm but no experience whatever. He was, like Bullitt, a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but there the similarities ended. A lawyer, campaign contributor, and the new (but third) husband of Marjorie Merriweather Post, one of the richest women in the world, Davies was in every sense a political appointee. He was sleek, self- confident, hungry for publicity, and proud of
They did not, but the State Department was sufficiently concerned that it sent one of its most trusted investigators, J. Klahr Huddle, to assess the situation. “It is difficult to express just what happened to the staff of the Moscow Embassy when Mr. Davies arrived,” Huddle reported back. One problem had been the difficulties of importing into the country all that the Davieses had wanted to bring. This included an entourage of sixteen aides, servants, and relatives, as well as a phalanx of freezers filled with the food they would consume while in residence at Spaso House. They demanded transportation on private trains—a concept unfamiliar to the Soviet railway authorities—together with Leningrad docking facilities for Mrs. Davies’s yacht, the
A man of broad knowledge in many fields, Davies was reluctant to acknowledge, Huddle noted, “his lack in the present one.” Soon after arriving he asked Henderson to produce, on two days’ notice, briefings on all the other European states, specifying their leadership, population, culture, religion, economy, alliances, and the status of their relations with the U.S.S.R. He quickly developed a dislike for Kennan, Huddle reported, which was unfortunate, “because Kennan prides himself on his knowledge of Russia, is very sensitive, and does his best work with a little encouragement and praise.” Overall, Huddle concluded, the ambassador in his first two months at Moscow had “very seriously” imperiled the morale of the embassy staff, and “when I arrived, [it] was almost at the breaking point.”13
George confirmed this to Jeanette: it would be some time before the effect wore off, and “I can take my profession seriously again. If I had had a little money, you would probably already have seen me trooping back to Wisconsin to start life over again.” Annelise added that the Davieses “are just awful.... I am trying to calm [George] down as best I can and just laugh it all off,” but “[i]t is worse than I ever could dream it to be.” The problem, Kennan later explained, was that men like Davies required underlings “to cover up their mistakes, to toss them meaningless baubles to keep them occupied, [and] to go on doing the important things under the surface.” By March, the staff could at least look forward to the temporary departure of the “Davies menage,” at which point, Kennan predicted, “the sun will begin to shine, the flowers to peep through the ground, and the little birdies will arrive from the South and tell us what a nice world it is after all.”14
The second of Stalin’s purges was going on that winter, which made the atmosphere all the more oppressive. “[E]verybody was so scared,” Annelise remembered. Davies gave a dinner for thirty-six people, of whom six were soon executed, “including the man who sat next to me.” The ambassador insisted on attending the trials, but before doing so asked Kennan to
go through the testimony and make for me a brief topical abstract of all of the various crimes recited, giving the name of the perpetrator, [and a] description of the crime in general terms not to exceed a sentence for each; as, for instance, “Three mine explosions, by blank, blank, blank.” I should like to have that soon.
He then brought a furious Kennan along to whisper translations of the proceedings: “During the intermissions I was sent, regularly, to fetch the ambassador his sandwiches, while he exchanged sententious judgments with the gentlemen of the press concerning the guilt of the victims.”
Davies assured the State Department that the trial had established “a definite political conspiracy to overthrow the present Government.” He was careful to point out, though, that the trials had not been fair by American standards, because the accused had been denied counsel, were forced to testify against themselves, and their guilt had been assumed from the start. He also saw to it that the department got another perspective. Noting that “Mr. Kennan has been here a great many years and is an exceptionally able man, thoroughly familiar with Russia,” Davies took the unusual step of forwarding his interpreter’s assessment of the trials, along with his own.
They were not that far apart. Kennan’s report emphasized the ease with which confessions could be coerced but acknowledged that the defendants had “probably done plenty, from the point of view of the regime, to warrant their humiliation and punishment.” What really happened might never be known: “[t]he Russian mind, as Dostoevski has shown, . . . sometimes carries both truth and falsehood to such infinite extremes that they eventually meet in space, like parallel lines, and it is no longer possible to distinguish between them.” In a significant acknowledgment of Kennan’s expertise, Robert Kelley, now the director of the Division of Eastern European Affairs, sent both reports to the secretary of state, Cordell Hull: they represented, he observed neutrally, “two points of view based on different methods of approach,” differing “only in degree” in their conclusions.15
Embassy security was another of Kennan’s concerns. While the Davieses were back in the United States, Thayer discovered a crude listening device—lowered on a fishpole in the Spaso House attic—in the wall behind the ambassador’s desk. Intrigued, the staff tried to catch the culprit, a project that required the rigging of trip wires, alarm bells, and in one instance Kennan’s spending an uncomfortable night in the billiard room with a nonfunctioning flashlight and an empty revolver. The results, in the end, were inconclusive. Davies was “displeased that we had ever inaugurated them,” fearing that they would compromise his public image of popularity with the Soviet leadership. It hardly mattered, for the ambassador “was not in the habit of saying things of any consequence, either in the bugged study or anywhere else.”16
“[Q]uite frankly I think that [Kennan] has been here quite long enough—perhaps too long for his own good,” Davies had by then written the State Department. “He is of a rather high-gear, nervous type” and had been ill “ever since I have been here.” Given his health along with the difficulties of raising a young family in Moscow, it would be good for all concerned if Kennan could be transferred to a post where living conditions were easier. The loss to the embassy would be serious, but it was “not fair to Kennan not to give him a chance to get well.”17
Kennan, for his part, was ready to go: as his comments about the “psychology of old men” suggest, he had been ready even before the Davies “menage” appeared on the scene. “This has been, for me, the most unhappy
