George F. Kennan : an American life

characterized the premodern tsars. The only difference now was that the Russians made weapons and could use them “with the best of us.” That raised the question, then, when the time came to make peace with Germany, “of whether Russia is to be the confusion or the salvation of the Western European continent.”⁸

Kennan’s image of a tree with thin roots came close to describing his own condition after weeks of confined hyperactivity. In one sense, he recalled, the responsibility of looking after other people from morning to night kept him from brooding too much about himself. But by February he was contemplating the possibility that he might never see his family again. That was when he drafted his long letter to Grace and Joan—never finished—in which he tried to explain what it would be like to grow up with a missing parent. The Kennan and James families, George warned his daughters, were susceptible to depression, even tragedy, but there was “something placid and gay and healthy in your mother’s nature which is a good corrective for all that, and which I hope you have inherited.”⁹

As the days dragged on with no end in sight, Kennan later admitted, “I had moments of real neurosis.” One came on a Sunday when he lunched alone, in “gloomy dignity,” then found in the lobby the luggage from the latest group of Americans to arrive from the latest country swallowed up by the Axis. The hotel had no one to move the bags upstairs, and none of the internees volunteered. So he himself performed the task, shaming a few other Americans into helping him load the elevator. At that point he remembered that his cocker spaniel Kimmy—“an unfortunate beast which [I] had been unable to get rid of in the last harried moments before internment”—had been left alone longer than was wise. Abandoning helpers, luggage, and elevator, George dashed to his room to find the dog surrounded by the shredded remains of the only photographs he had of Annelise, Grace, and Joan. Using the third person, he described what happened next:

With a gasp of horror, [he] fetched the puppy a whack which sent it flying across the room to the corner, where it promptly made a puddle. Then, to his own dismay, [he] burst into unmanly tears, for the first time in all the months of confinement. Knowing that he could never expect two minutes’ peace from the responsibilities of his position, he quickly locked the door . . . , and then set about laboriously and with streaming eyes . . . attempting to fit the snapshots together. There were several knocks on the door, while this was in progress, repeated indignantly after puzzled pauses; but he ignored them all until finally there was a great thumping and rattling of the door handle. Knowing, with the intuition of a prisoner, that this last visitor could be none other than [Morris] himself, [he] pulled himself together and opened the door.¹⁰

That, however, was not the worst experience. Something else happened in April, and it was serious enough for Kennan to resume—briefly—keeping his diary:

April 19: [O]ne cannot go through life as a general ascetic, merely to exert control over one particular urge. That is only acknowledging one’s slavery to it.... There is only one solution.... It is to acknowledge one’s self as old and beyond those things. My God, man, you are no youngster any more. What do you expect?

April 20: What I have been guilty of was in my eyes a folly, to be sure, but a minor one; and there were plenty of ameliorating circumstances. That it should have been punished in so grotesque and humiliating a manner is what sets me back.... I cannot face these people now.... To think that I, George Kennan, should be in the position of having to conceal anything. If I go among them and lead a normal life, and the thing later comes out, I have made myself a double-hypocrite.... I have been thwarted, as I was when I was a boy. . . . But what are the “real things” you can’t have? Women, that’s one thing. Liberty is another. Peace of mind’s a third. Isn’t that enough? Yes, I suppose it is.

April 22: For a man to feel himself young in my circumstances means that he must of necessity be very tough of heart, very gay, very well-balanced in his human relationships, and relatively irresponsible. I am none of these things. I cannot therefore be young successfully. Nor can I continue to be young unsuccessfully. The resultant fiascos would soon be too much for me and would affect not only me but likewise the people I love.¹¹

So what was this all about? Another sexual indiscretion? An exposure of irresponsibility in some other form? Perhaps even an overblown reaction to having lost his composure and locked himself in his room over the depredations of a dog?

What occurred was less important than what it showed, which was how precariously Kennan balanced leadership against fragility. Both were in evidence on May 5, 1942, the day he got confirmation that the internment was to end: the group would depart by train for Lisbon in a week, and thence by ship home. Kennan drafted the notice, got Morris to sign it, posted it in the empty front hallway, and then walked away. It had required months of work to bring this about, and he was sure that his fellow internees, for the most part, would be ungrateful.

I am utterly worn out by the strain of living uninterruptedly for 5 months under one roof with 135 other people among whom I have no single intimate friend, and of trying to save them from dangers for which they had no appreciation. My own personal life and strength have been so neglected that I have felt during the last few days something close to an incipient disintegration of personality: a condition of spirit devoid of all warmth, all tone, all humor and all enthusiasm.

There were complaints about being limited to a single carry-on bag on the train, this on a day “when thousands of people are dying . . . for what they conceive to be important issues.” Kennan was so disgusted “that I couldn’t bring myself to go down to dinner and have locked myself in my room for the evening.”¹²

He was also, by this time, fed up with his own government. There had been no communication from the State Department, even through the Swiss, until shortly before the departure. At that point two messages arrived, neither of which boosted morale. One announced that the Foreign Service officers would not be paid for the period of their internment, since they had not been working. A second raised the possibility of sending only half of the internees back on the Drottningholm, the designated Swedish repatriation ship, in order to make room for refugees, presumably Jewish. “Mr. Morris and I succeeded in warding off both of these blows.” It was not, Kennan explained years later, that “you didn’t want the Jews to come.” But “my God, this was an exchange ship.” If half the Americans hadn’t come, half of the Germans wouldn’t have been repatriated either. “We didn’t know anything about [the Holocaust], and obviously being prisoners we didn’t learn anything about it.”¹³

The Americans arrived in Lisbon on May 16, a day on which Kennan indulged himself in two long-postponed pleasures. One was a hearty breakfast at the Spanish-Portuguese border station, which he, as the internees’ official representative, was able to enjoy while they remained, enviously hungry, on the train. The second was a poem composed—it showed—on a full stomach:

From you, embattled comrades in abstention,

Compatriots to this or that degree,

Who’ve shared with me the hardships of detention,

In Jeschke’s Grand and guarded hostelry—

From you, my doughty champions of the larder,

Who’ve fought with such persistency and skill,

Such mighty hearts, such overwhelming ardor,

The uninspiring battle of the swill—

From you, my friends, from your aggrieved digestions,

From all the pangs of which you love to tell,

Your dwindling flesh and your enraged intestines,

Permit me now to take a fond farewell. . . .

The world might choke in food-restricting measures;

Chinese might starve; and Poles might waste