George F. Kennan : an American life

disappeared in circumstances suggesting “exile, imprisonment, or disgrace, if not execution.” Soviet citizens entering the United States should be watched with a view to determining “where they were and what they were doing.” Kennan tried to explain to a puzzled Secretary of State Hull—it was the only meeting they ever had—why Russian communists were arresting American communists who happened to be in the Soviet Union. He prepared a brief report on Comintern activities, spent a fair amount of time on Soviet-American trade, and devoted very little to explaining why the moment was not right to seek Moscow’s cooperation in demarcating the Alaskan boundary in the Bering Sea.²⁶

The spring of 1938 brought Kennan two professional recognitions, only one of which he knew about. The latter was an invitation to lecture at the Foreign Service School, where he had been a student twelve years before. He spoke on “Russia,” quoting Neill Brown’s dispatches from the 1850s to show how little had changed since tsarist times. He found it “almost impossible to conceive of our being Russia’s enemy,” but “I cannot see that the possibility of our being Russia’s ally is much greater.” The United States must simply show patience: in a close paraphrase of Bullitt’s 1936 “swan song,” Kennan insisted that “[w]e must neither expect too much nor despair of getting anything at all.”²⁷

The recognition of which Kennan was unaware came by way of espionage. On April 22 he drafted an internal memorandum, not meant for circulation beyond the State Department, questioning Davies’s optimism about the future of Soviet-American relations. “According to the theories on which the Soviet state is founded,” Kennan pointed out, “the entire outside world is hostile and no foreigner should ever be trusted.” Davies’s dispatch found its way into the official compilation of documents on U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union for this period, published in 1952. Kennan’s commentary did not. But thanks to the enterprise of Aleksandr Troyanovsky, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, both documents wound up, in the summer of 1938, on the desk of Josef Stalin.

Troyanovsky had got them “by conspiratorial means,” he explained, and “absolutely no one” in the Washington embassy or at the Soviet Foreign Ministry knew that he had done so. Davies, “a typical bourgeois,” had both positive and negative things to say about the Soviet Union, but he had to contend with hostility in the State Department, led chiefly by Kennan. He “speaks Russian well and is a nephew [sic] of the celebrated George Kennan, who in the 1880s [sic] wrote the well-known book, ‘Siberia and Hard Labor,’ which we all read at one time or another.” Kennan’s attacks on Davies showed that he was “trying to turn Roosevelt personally against us,” but despite these efforts the president and Secretary of State Hull “have not lost their equilibrium and in general take a comparatively acceptable position toward us.”²⁸

The security breach would have appalled Kennan, had he known of it, but the notoriety might have pleased him: Stalin personally underlined the most significant sections of Troyanovsky’s report. Kennan could not have disputed the Soviet ambassador’s assessment of his intentions, or his lack of success, for the moment, in seeing them realized. Stalin, no doubt, filed the information in his capacious memory, for future use.

IV.

There were also, that spring, two quietly personal gratifications. After Hitler annexed Austria in March, George helped his Jewish “Frau Doktor,” Frieda Por, emigrate to the United States. “That saves my life,” she wrote in an unpublished memoir she prepared four decades later. “It is almost unbelievable that you are now in America,” Annelise wrote Frieda after George met her in New York. “I only hope that you will like it and that you will be able to work as you wish.” And then on June 13, 1938, in Milwaukee, Annelise herself became an American citizen.²⁹

She and the children were spending the summer at Pine Lake, leaving a self-pitying George in Washington, bereft of family, car, or money, busing home each night along an avenue of filling stations, advertising signboards, hot-dog stands, junked automobiles, and trailer camps, to dine on a bowl of cereal and then to sit for an hour or so on the front steps. So it was a relief for him to get to Wisconsin in June. While there, he rented a bicycle for a few days with a view to discovering whether there was still a house at the end of some country road where “human warmth and simplicity and graciousness defied the encroachments of a diseased world.”³⁰

He found the highways deserted, except for the people traveling them encased in metal machines: in a hundred miles he met no other cyclist, pedestrian, or horse-drawn vehicle. The drivers and their passengers had no more of a link with the landscape than if they had been on an airplane flying over it. They were “lost spirits,” for whom “space existed only in time.” The roads were a far cry from “the vigorous life of the English highway of Chaucer’s day.” But there were inns and taverns along his route, with helpful people willing to provide directions.

As a consequence, George was able to find the farm, near Packwaukee, that his grandfather had once owned and where his father had grown up. The old house was gone, but there was a new farmer with a house of his own who insisted, despite George’s unexpected arrival, that he stay the night. This he did, washing up in the kitchen, eating with the family and the farmhands, occupying the guest bedroom, and rising early the next morning for a breakfast as hearty as the supper had been. The farm, unlike the highway, was a community, with the only intimation that it might not survive coming in the arrival of a college-educated daughter, “smart, well-dressed, confident, blooming with health and energy, . . . a breath of air from another world.” It seemed unlikely that she would wind up on the farm: the city, “at once so menacing and so promising,” had claimed her for its own.

George saw the future himself when he spent the next night in a college town where the streets were empty except for automobiles, each containing a couple or two “bent on pleasure—usually vicarious pleasure—in the form of a movie or a dance or a petting party.” Anyone unlucky enough not to be among these “private, mathematically correct companies” would be alone. “There was no place where strangers would come together freely—as in a Bavarian beer hall or a Russian amusement park—for the mere purpose of being together and enjoying new acquaintances. Even the saloons were nearly empty.”

All of this convinced George that the technology industrialization had made possible—automobiles, movies, radio, mass-circulation magazines, the advertising that paid for them—was creating an exaggerated desire for privacy. It was making an English upper-class evil a vice of American society. This was

the sad climax of individualism, the blind-alley of a generation which had forgotten how to think or live collectively, of a people whose private lives were so brittle, so insecure that they dared not subject them to the slightest social contact with the casual stranger, of people who felt neither curiosity nor responsibility for the mass of those who shared their community life and their community problems.

Americans had in the past, to be sure, subordinated personal interests to collective needs in the face of floods, hurricanes, or great wars. Perhaps some new cataclysm would force them to do so again. Kennan looked forward to it much as Chekhov, in the 1890s, had anticipated the “cruel and mighty storm which is advancing upon us, which . . . will soon blow all the laziness, the indifference, the prejudice against work and the rotten boredom out of our society.” Whatever might be sacrificed in years to come, Kennan concluded, “the spirit of fellowship, having reached its lowest conceivable ebb, could not fail to be the gainer.”³¹

The bicycle trip and the essay it inspired amplified the anxieties about America that he had raised with Bullitt two summers before, but they added the idea that challenges—cataclysms of some kind—could be a good thing. This idea too would stick in Kennan’s mind, reappearing, nine years later, in the carefully read pages of Foreign Affairs:

The thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin’s