George F. Kennan : an American life

persistent paradoxes: that he understood the Soviet Union far better than he did the United States.

Kennan’s analyses of the U.S.S.R. were as sophisticated as anything available at the time. By the end of his first decade in the Foreign Service, he was explaining Russian society far better than Russians were doing for themselves. He had proven himself a worthy successor to the first George Kennan, a point not lost on Soviet officialdom at the highest level. And yet the second Kennan’s writing about the United States showed no sophistication at all. He portrayed an America devoid of leadership, riddled with corruption, engulfed in pollution, beset with boredom, and pervaded by such loneliness that the entire country seemed populated by refugees from Edward Hopper paintings. It was as if the New Deal had never happened.

In an unpublished memoir also composed in 1938, Kennan made a point of describing how a committee of experts under Austria’s chancellor Kurt Schusch-nigg had revised that country’s social insurance system three years earlier: the government had been authoritarian, yet it had shown that an “intelligent, determined ruling minority” could act more responsibly than most democracies. Had Nazi Germany not taken over Austria, the scheme would have been “a model of foresight and thoroughness.” But in 1935, the same year that Schuschnigg’s experts submitted their recommendations, the Roosevelt administration established from scratch, through constitutional processes, a social security system far more robust than its Austrian counterpart. Kennan seems not to have noticed this, or the more general fact that an American democratic revolution was taking place in the 1930s that would, for all its shortcomings, shape world history at least as decisively as what was happening in the authoritarian states of Europe.³⁷

To be sure, the Department of State did not expect Kennan to write professionally about the United States. His “reporting” on America was to himself and—occasionally in a sanitized form—to Jeanette and Bill Bullitt. He was free to indulge in impressions, omissions, even inconsistencies. But the same was true of his letters and diary entries about the Soviet Union, which also were not meant for publication. It’s clear from reading these that Kennan knew what he was writing about. It’s clear from reading his writings on the United States that he did not.

One explanation is that he had not lived there for more than a few months since being sent to Geneva in 1927. He had never traveled as extensively in the United States as he had in Europe. He had read more American literature than American history, and he appears to have had no interest at all in American politics. He viewed the country through a series of snapshots that were, to him, extraordinarily vivid; but they focused on small scenes at particular moments. They offered little sense of the country as a whole, or of its evolution through time. They provided a poor basis for grandiloquent generalizations about where the United States had been and where it was going.

Another difficulty was that Kennan romanticized what he did know. He could remember an America in which travel was by train and boat, automobiles were a novelty, not a curse, and country roads were elongated communities, like Chaucer’s highways. Something of value had indeed been lost. But that same America had lacked antibiotics: hence his mother’s death from a ruptured appendix, and his own near-death from scarlet fever. It was as if Kennan filtered his past through a gauzy screen, blurring or even eliminating the bad parts, while exaggerating those he saw in the present.

That led him, in turn, to turn personal grievances into national problems. He blamed capitalism for having left him on the verge of poverty in 1932, but he was hardly alone in this and as a result the domestic political system had brought about reforms. But it had also brought Joe Davies to Moscow in 1937, so there was little to be said for it: “Was the Foreign Service really supposed . . . to place itself at the disposal of each successive administration as a nurse-maid to its patronage creditors? If so, we were really nothing but high-paid flunkeys.”³⁸ Kennan’s view of the United States lacked a sense of proportion: displacement failed to produce the detachment that characterized the perspectives of foreign interpreters like Alexis de Tocqueville, James Bryce, and Alistair Cooke.

The problem, fundamentally, was patriotism. “I wonder whether anyone who has not lived abroad can understand the hypersensitiveness which expatriate Americans can develop toward their own country,” Kennan wrote in another unpublished memoir composed in the early 1940s. Their information was necessarily based more on past memories than on present knowledge, yet faith in the United States was a spiritual necessity. “Were it to be otherwise—were it not to be possible to rely on the basic worthiness, the decency, the justice and the soundness of one’s own country—then the Foreign Service officer would indeed be a lost soul.” So Kennan came back to America “glowing inwardly at everything which . . . is sound and right and refreshing, and wincing at everything which offends a taste rendered more discriminate than the average by its ability to draw comparisons.” His sensitivity was that of a musical instrument, vibrating to the “most minute phenomena,” for “[t]hat which he represented having been judged for years by him, he can now do no other than to judge himself by that which he represents.”³⁹

“I think it’s so extraordinary,” Chip Bohlen later recalled. “He really sees things in a somber light, particularly as far as the United States is concerned.” And yet “I don’t mean for one minute the slightest suggestion that he wasn’t a patriotic government servant. Indeed he was.” Kennan viewed himself as so American that he had trouble distinguishing his own character from that of his country: he had always found it difficult, Bohlen remembered, to “divorce his visceral feelings from his knowledge of facts.”⁴⁰ Because he was by nature a pessimist, he took a pessimistic view of the United States. Whatever inward glow he may have felt appeared rarely in what he wrote, but the winces—and worse—were always there. Faith in America left him doubting democracy: an American-bred authoritarianism, hence, was the only alternative.

Wisconsin was an exception. Despite the loneliness of its highways and the bleakness of its small-town life, it was, Kennan believed, a “compact commonwealth” with an admirable balance between industry and agriculture, a sturdy population, and a tradition of humaneness and good nature. Could it not become, like some of the small neutral countries of Europe, a refuge for decency and common sense? But this too was personalizing the country: Wisconsin was home and therefore his own refuge. It was a place where he could “conceivably be content,” confident that he was doing something worthwhile. Salvation lay in smallness, whether of government, avocation, or aspiration.

The time for that, however, had not yet come. Kennan was “much too broke and in debt” to contemplate retirement from the Foreign Service. Moreover, Europe was heating up, what with Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March and his demands for Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland: “I did not want to miss the climax.” So Kennan made his plea to his friends in the State Department, and they responded, in August, with instructions to depart as soon as possible for Prague.⁴¹ It would be, also, a “compact commonwealth,” but one surrounded, unlike Wisconsin, by Nazi German authoritarianism.

SEVEN

Czechoslovakia and Germany: 1938–1941

“ALL IN ALL, I THINK IT IS AN EXCELLENT SOLUTION,” KENNAN wrote Bullitt in August 1938. The assignment to Prague was “eminently satisfactory.” He would be the only secretary in the American legation. He knew German, “and I find that I can read Bohemian with little difficulty, after the effort I’ve put in on Russian.” His time in Vienna had given him an interest in Central Europe. The only disappointment was that “I cannot have another chance to work with you.”¹