III.
The psychological distance between the two Berlins was even greater than the physical distance, so for the moment—uncharacteristically—George Kennan was happy. But he was still in the Foreign Service and there was still a war on; hence on September 8, 1942, George loaded his family into the back of a borrowed milk truck, leaving Kimmy—who was to stay behind on the farm—racing desperately after them. Grace went to Washington, where she would spend the year in boarding school, while Annelise and Joan accompanied George back to Lisbon: his new assignment was to be counselor at the American legation in Portugal. The trip this time was by air. “It is just surreal to go so far so fast,” Annelise wrote of the three-day flight via Bermuda and the Azores. “Somehow it doesn’t seem right.” She regretted leaving so soon. “Little by little my roots have fastened in the States,” she assured Jeanette. “I like the country and love the people—in spite of what George thinks of them.”22
George, for his part, accepted the wartime obligation of overseas service but envied those who could perform it in uniform. Military life carried risks, but survivors would return with the laurels “simply by virtue of their participation.” Diplomacy too had its dangers, but there would be no rewards.
In the task they have given me, I cannot succeed. I can hope to do better than other, less experienced men. But what I can do will be known to very few people, and appreciated by fewer still; and the effort will probably end in personal catastrophe for myself and the family.
Internment had at least taught him that “there is nothing worse than a vacillation between hope and despair.” Strength came from having one or the other—“possi-bly they are the same thing.” Kennan recorded these gloomy thoughts because “I feel that if I hold them constantly before me I shall be able to do my job with greater detachment, greater humor, less nervous wear-and-tear, and, paradoxically, greater enjoyment.”23
“I am neither happy nor unhappy,” he wrote Jeanette from Lisbon. He could never feel at home in a place, however beautiful, “where it never snows, where the hot summer is the dead dormant season, and where the grass gets green and the crops are put out in the fall. But I’m doing my job as best I can and—hell—it’s war.” Finances were again a problem: “We are broke, as usual.” Portuguese living costs were high, Grace’s school fees were a drain, and income from the corn crop had been slow to show up: “I hope the people in East Berlin won’t get too excited about our arrears.” Annelise was helping out by working in the legation press office. She found it “fun to get into a field which the Germans have had very much to themselves and see the results.” Nevertheless, she added, “[w]e almost turn handsprings to save 15 dollars a month.”
With the Anglo-American landings in North Africa on November 8, the war news was better. But Annelise’s family in Norway was having a hard winter, and early in 1943 she learned that her father had been arrested. “He will take it,” George told Jeanette, “just about the way our father would have, in similar circumstances.” It was, though, Annelise emphasized, a grave, even life-threatening situation, made all the more frustrating by the fact that there was nothing they could do to help. Meanwhile George’s job offered “no triumphs, no glory, no recognition—not even the satisfaction of physical hardship and combat. When the war is over, I won’t even want to talk about it.”24
There was one unexpected drama, though. On February 22, 1943, the Pan American Airways
Portugal, with Spain, had maintained an uneasy neutrality in the war. But whereas Generalissimo Francisco Franco had tilted his country toward the Axis, the Portuguese, honoring the spirit if not the letter of their ancient alliance with Great Britain, had inclined in the opposite direction. Politics and geography attracted intelligence services from all sides: Kennan estimated that eleven operated in Lisbon simultaneously, several of them employing double agents. “There were so many spies,” the British diplomat Frank Roberts recalled, “that they completely obliterated each other.” One of Kennan’s unannounced tasks was to try to straighten out at least some of the confusions.26
There were many. The Office of War Information was portraying the Portuguese prime minister, Dr. Antonio Salazar, as a Franco-like fascist. The Board of Economic Warfare was withholding food and arms in an effort to discourage the Portuguese from providing wolfram and other strategic commodities to the Germans. The Office of Strategic Services was organizing a rebellion against Portuguese rule in the Azores. The British were stockpiling fuel there with a view to securing air and naval bases for the forthcoming invasion of Western Europe. Meanwhile Bert Fish, the amiable but placid American minister in Lisbon—Roosevelt appointed him as a favor to a Florida senator —had made no effort to reach any agreement with Salazar on overall Portuguese-American interests. “Ah ain’t goin’ down there and get mah backsides kicked around,” Kennan recalled him explaining. “He’s too smaht for me.”27
Sorting this out required that Kennan focus for the first time on grand strategy. What, exactly, did the United States want from Portugal? To what extent were its practices consistent with its priorities? Were those priorities consistent with one another? Did any single agency or official know everything that was going on, or care? How did all of this relate to winning the war, or to what would happen when peace returned? The problem was not just that of a right and left hand failing to communicate. The more appropriate analogy would have been a confused Hindu deity with multiple arms, each appendage busily at work on projects of which the others were unaware.
Kennan’s first approach was a traditional one: he studied the situation and, in February 1943, drafted a long analysis, sent under Fish’s name to the State Department, which specified, as the critical American interest, obtaining the Azores bases. It suggested letting the British negotiate the arrangements, justifying them under the Anglo-Portuguese treaty of 1373. Any other course, it warned, risked destabilizing the Salazar regime, perhaps even provoking German intervention. When the department did not respond, Kennan followed up with another dispatch pointing out that Salazar seemed inclined toward an alliance with the Western powers. This elicited no reply either, just “that peculiar and profound sort of silence which is made only by the noise of a diplomatic dispatch hitting the Department’s files.”28
By early April, Kennan was complaining privately about having to clean up the messes inexperienced people had made, while coping with lack of interest and confidence on the part of bosses. The frustrations were such that his ulcer—“that modern mark of distinction”—had returned, requiring a trip home for treatment. He was not as ill as he had been in Moscow, he told Jeanette, but “an ulcer is an inexorable sort of thing. You just have to let down.” George got to Washington in June, retrieved Grace from her school, and spent a few weeks with her on the farm: “I simply love the place.” Both then sailed for Lisbon on July 21, giving George the time, while at sea, to reflect on his country, and its capacity to lead the world.29
IV.
He did so in a ten-page single-spaced typed letter, intended only for Jeanette, which began with all the forebodings about America that his encounters with it—however brief—tended to set off. There had been a “retrogression” in civilian life “no less inexorable than our military advance.... I sometimes wonder whether, as in the case of declining Rome, its pace is not the price we are paying for the victory in arms.” Familiar worries
