George F. Kennan : an American life

away;

But God forbid that you—my tender treasures—

Should face the horrors of a meatless day.

The Drottningholm sailed, well supplied, on the twenty-second, with the ship’s name and the word “DIPLOMAT” painted in huge black letters against its white sides to ward off submarine attacks. It arrived safely arrived in New York on the thirtieth.¹⁴

II.

Annelise had rented a house in Bronxville, New York, shortly before Pearl Harbor, and was there with the children when she learned of George’s internment. The State Department told her not to expect him back before March: “I just keep praying that nothing will happen to make it more complicated than it is.” Beyond that, she had no information: “I never had heard a word about him. No communication whatever.” Shortly before his release, George was able to send a message through the department asking about his family. It reached Annelise as a telegram from the secretary of state. “I was sure he was dead,” she recalled. “I was so furious. I sat down and wrote a telegram [that] said: ‘I’m glad for the first opportunity to tell where we are and the welfare of the children.’ He never got it.”¹⁵

Frieda Por, who examined George soon after his return, found that he had lost fifteen pounds, his stomach problems had returned, and it had been only “through the exercise of great willpower that he was able to continue carrying out his heavy responsibilities.” On the basis of her report, the State Department authorized a forty-five-day leave.¹⁶ The Kennans used it, not to relax, but to buy a farm.

“I am a great believer in the power of the soil over the human beings who live above it,” George had told his Badheim University “students” in one of his lectures on Russian history. His private reasons for wanting a farm were more complicated. A happy personal life, he had concluded while interned, would never be possible. Professional satisfaction was out of reach because Americans, “biologically undermined and demoralized,” had a broken political system. The solution, then, was “the sort of glorified gardening called gentleman farming, . . . the only form of playing with toys which is not ridiculous in elderly men.” (George was thirty-eight at the time.) But he could not ask his wife and children to give up “the advantages of education and all personal amenities.” The ideal thing, therefore, would be to combine agriculture and diplomacy, “[f]or the same sort of catastrophe is not likely to hit both of them simultaneously.”¹⁷

The Kennans had no farming experience: only a book, called Five Acres and Independence. They would not be able to manage a farm alone, but they could, Annelise pointed out, rent it to a resident farmer: “I’m always a little more realistic than George.” Wisconsin was out as long as he remained in the Foreign Service, so the farm would have to be near Washington. They began looking, then, in the Gettysburg region of southern Pennsylvania. “It is lovely rolling country, with beautiful rich soil,” George wrote Jeanette.

I’m sure you would love the houses. They are all, I think, well over a century old, and have great potential charm. The farms themselves are also beautiful: with plenty of timber and springs and streams and comfortable quiet old lanes. I am quite surprised at the values, because although they are not much more expensive than the farms we looked at in Wisconsin, the buildings and equipment are better beyond comparison.

By the last week in June, the Kennans had given up the Bronxville house, stored their furniture, and set off “after the fashion of modern pioneers: the whole damned family, including the dog [the disgraced Kimmy, now forgiven], the phonograph and the typewriter, in an old Ford car—and with no home on the face of the globe.” Their address, for the near future, would be simply “General Delivery, Gettysburg, Pa.”¹⁸

“[W]e haven’t bought a farm yet,” Annelise added a few days later, but despite the temptation “to say to hell with it all, let’s go somewhere nice where we can swim and sail and loaf,” they were still at it “with all the perseverance that a Scott [sic] and a Norwegian can muster.” They had seen one promising possibility: a 238-acre farm with an enormous three-story house, a smaller one for a tenant farmer, a tobacco barn, and a three-car garage, owned by the children of a Jewish emigrant, Joseph Miller, who had used it as a temporary refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The house was ugly, awkward, filled with junk, and had not been cleaned since the old man’s death: “It was just like the Cherry Orchard without the orchard.” The price was $14,000, which would require, Annelise worried, “such a big mortgage.” A few days later, she wrote again: “Jeanette, hold on tight—yesterday we bought it!”¹⁹

On July 21, 1942, George reported to his sister that the family had spent its first night in their own house. There had been cobwebs everywhere, “and I had no idea what sort of beasts or ghosts would emerge.” Only a few doors had banged, though, and “we are starting on our first full day of country life.” The motor for the pump had rusted and the well had silted up, but “never mind, we’ll make it.” By the next morning, he was relishing

the horses munching and stamping, the cows giving voice, the pidgeons cooing in the loft, the roosters crowing, and the flies buzzing. I even enjoy having to chase the ducks out from under my car every time I want to drive it away. In short, I really do enjoy these things, and I don’t much care that I have to work hard from morning to night to do so.

It was not clear “whether we’ll be able to swing it financially, or whether [the farm] will gradually eat us up and ruin us, too.” But he had no regrets. “I have the sense of having my hands on something really solid.... I can see the results of my own handiwork, and they are results that last.” On the door frame leading into the house the Kennans discovered—and thought it right to keep—a mezuzah, the Jewish acknowledgment of the blessings of life.

That evening George took Grace, one of the tenant farmer’s children, and Kimmy on a walk through towering stalks of corn. While the dog flushed pheasants and chased rabbits, George climbed a cherry tree to survey his estate. It was astonishing, he explained to his sister,

to have so much land that you can take an hour’s walk just in one direction without getting off your own property. To me it was such an enjoyment that I sometimes think if it only lasts a year or two it will have been well worth it, and I can return again to vagabondage, strengthened and refreshed by the mere reminiscences.

Located just outside the village of East Berlin, Pennsylvania, the farm allowed at least one economy. Beginning with this letter, and continuing until the supply ran out, the Kennans used stationery George had brought back from the other Berlin, scratching out the German street address and adding a carefully placed “East” and “Pa.”²⁰

The East Berlin News-Comet reported on July 24 that the Miller farm had been sold to “a Mr. Kennedy of New York and Washington, D.C.,” who with his wife and two children would use the property for leisure activities and as their summer home. The editor, Harriet Tierney, had gotten the news from the town barber, Lavere Burgard, who later corrected the story to say that the name was more like “Cannon” and that the buyer “had something to do with the government.” The George Shetters, who owned the local restaurant, confirmed this information, noting that the gentleman in question had made a long-distance phone call from there. East Berlin had little experience with important outsiders, and so the rumors began to fly. Mrs. Tierney then took it upon herself to settle the matter by driving out to the Miller place to find out who the newcomers were. Satisfied, she wrote another story introducing the Kennan family to East Berlin.²¹