thank you enough for taking my little girls,” she wrote Jeanette from the ship. “I miss them like hell—it was terribly hard to leave.” But “George is not the kind of person who is happy alone and I think he needs me more than the children do (as long as they can stay with you).” Jeanette later admitted to having felt imposed on. “I at the time had [my] three boys and the two girls and I was running a nursery school, and there were times when I felt: ‘Oh! It’s much easier to go back to Germany with George!’ But it wasn’t that much easier for her.”48
Annelise had gone back for several reasons. Her family in Norway had survived the German invasion and was for the moment safe. George had even been allowed to visit the Sorensens briefly before traveling to America. She hoped to do the same, but the Germans refused to allow this: “It is a great disappointment.” She also worried about the “Kennan depression” she saw in the letters George had written from Berlin. “I know now that he really did have a bad time and that there were many things which I could have helped him with,” she explained to Jeanette. “What a life! It may be exciting in spots, but it almost tears one to pieces. (If I don’t stop soon I’ll sound as gloomy as George!)”49
Something else concerned her as well. Annelise had discovered, by this time, that George’s bachelor existence in Berlin had not been celibate: “Our personal life was also very difficult at that time.” He had always, he admitted when he was seventy-eight, had a roving eye: “ ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.’ My God, I’ve coveted ten thousand of them in the course of my life, and will continue to do so on into the eighties.” Who this one was, how long the relationship lasted, and how Annelise found out about it remain unclear. Her resolve, however, was firm. When asked decades later why she had left her children to return to a war zone, she cut off further discussion with a single sentence: “To save the marriage.”50
As the summer wore on, this arrangement too began to unravel. Despite Jeanette’s willingness to provide a home for Grace and Joan when they had no other, the burdens on her were growing, but there was no way for both George and Annelise to make another long trip home. He was now the second-ranking officer in the embassy, with no one under him qualified to take over his responsibilities. So Annelise would return alone in September. “We have been so touched by what you have told about the children,” George wrote Jeanette. “Poor little things, I wonder if they are destined always to bat around from one place to another with at best half of the normal parent complement.”51
The need for roots was much on his mind that fall. Plans to purchase part of the island in Kristiansand had fallen through, probably fortunately in the light of the war. Now, though, George had another idea, even if Jeanette thought it “mad”: he wanted to buy a farm somewhere in the United States: “I have thought this over very carefully and know what I am doing.” After a series of rapid promotions, he was at last relatively well off. American farms were less expensive than Berlin houses, and after all how many other people made $8,000 a year? He had lived for too long with no home at all. He had seen too many places “where every form of existence except that of the small land-holder has been pretty thoroughly shattered.” Wisconsin looked like the best bet: it was where the Kennans had lived longer than anywhere else. So might Jeanette and Gene sound out the owner of their grandfather’s old farm near Packwaukee?52
IX.
“Dined at the Hoyos’ to meet an American couple, the George Kennans,” Marie Vassiltchikov, a young White Russian living in Berlin who kept a remarkable diary, noted on May 26, 1941. “He has highly intelligent eyes but does not speak freely, but then the situation is of course ambiguous, as the Germans are still allies of Soviet Russia.” Kennan faulted himself and his Berlin colleagues, years later, for not having foreseen the abrupt end of that alliance less than a month later. Enough indications of trouble had accumulated, however, for the embassy to warn the State Department, which in turn tried to alert the Kremlin. None of this had any effect, and on June 22 the invasion began. Two days later Kennan sent Loy Henderson, now back in Washington, his views on this major turning point in the war.
He could see the advantage of extending material aid to the Soviet Union “whenever called for by our own self- interest.” But there should be no attempts to identify politically or ideologically with the Russian war effort, because to do so would also associate the United States with
the Russian destruction of the Baltic states, with the attack against Finnish independence, with the partitioning of Poland and Rumania, with the crushing of religion throughout Eastern Europe, and with the domestic policy of a regime which is widely feared and detested throughout this part of the world and the methods of which are far from democratic. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that in every border country concerned, from Scandinavia— including Norway and Sweden—to the Black Sea, Russia is generally more feared than Germany.
The Soviet Union was in the war because it had collaborated with Hitler, thereby playing “a lone hand in a dangerous game.” It must now take the consequences alone. Sharing no principles with the Western democracies, it had “no claim on Western sympathies.”53
It was a typical Kennan memorandum, relentlessly clear-sighted in its assessment of European realities, yet wholly impractical in its neglect of domestic political necessities in Washington and London. For how were Roosevelt and the new British prime minister, Winston Churchill, to persuade their democracies to aid the Soviet war effort without identifying politically and ideologically with it? On this point Kennan’s nemesis Joseph E. Davies provided more useful advice, insisting in the face of State and War Department skepticism that the Russians would survive the Nazi onslaught, while offering to lead a publicity campaign to convince an equally doubtful American public that the U.S.S.R. would be a worthy ally. FDR listened to Davies, encouraged his efforts, and—given the circumstances—was right to do so.54
Kennan’s attention remained focused on German-dominated Europe, where by the fall of 1941 the disaster confronting Jews was becoming obvious. “We didn’t know about the gas chambers,” he recalled. But “we had no optimistic feelings about the fate of the Jewish community. We thought they were in for it.” One striking indication of this, George wrote Annelise in October, was the new requirement that the Jews wear yellow stars:
That is a fantastically barbaric thing. I shall never forget the faces of people in the subway with the great yellow star sewed onto their overcoats, standing, not daring to sit down or to brush against anybody, staring straight ahead of them with eyes like terrified beasts—nor the sight of little children running around with those badges sewn on them.
Most Germans, he sensed, were “shocked and troubled by the measure.” Perhaps as a result, “the remaining Jews are being deported in large batches, and very few more stars are to be seen.”55
“We went to great lengths in the embassy in Berlin,” Kennan remembered, “to try to rescue the Jewish children and get them out.” The staff had difficulty, however, getting accurate information about the number of children from their parents and from the Jewish community. “[T]hey would falsify their statistics, they wouldn’t come clean about things.” Perhaps, Kennan later acknowledged, that was how the Jews had survived for centuries in Europe: “Wherever they met authority they had to try to get around it. But all I can say is that we were jolly well fed up with them.”56
Kennan sensed, during the final months of 1941, “that things were now out of control—not only out of
