Kennan’s Foreign Service colleagues suspected him, one of them recalled, of using his illnesses to get out of boring jobs and back into the center of things. Certainly he did not stop working—he simply shifted the nature of it. He went to the farm, exhausted himself with physical labor, and as he explained to Bullitt, recovered remarkably quickly:
I have painted rooms, built a culvert, hauled gravel, taught the farm boys how to plough on the contour, set out over a hundred and fifty trees all by myself, cleaned and heated and cooked for myself. I have had poison ivy and a sore back and torn fingers and mangled shins and a cold and sinus infection; and I am nevertheless so well that you will not know me when you see me.
“Excuse the sloppiness,” George added in a letter to Gene Hotchkiss. “Getting callouses on your hands seems to raise hell with the more delicate capacities, such as letter-writing.” Early in April, still unsure of his next assignment but relieved that it would not be London, George cabled Annelise in Lisbon to suggest that she pack things up and await further word: “Love to yourself and children. Hope we can soon be together.” Three weeks later he was able to add: “Everything fine feeling much improved.”50
Life at the farm allowed a brief reversion to bachelor life: George invited his old friend Cyrus Follmer—himself a Bad Nauheim internee, now working at the State Department—to East Berlin for a visit. They reminisced about the other Berlin and the Kozhenikovs, while Cyrus got enlisted in planting more trees. Some of the walnuts, George wrote several weeks later, were “thrusting themselves up with the most uninhibited abandon” while others were “hiding away in the deep grass.” But “to them that last shall be given gifts that no extrovert can boast of: inner strength, and the fortitude born of suffering, and great persistence.” “That my dear Cyrus,” George concluded, “ends my little Sunday morning sermon.... I am apparently going abroad again soon: very far, and for a long time; and I am sad to think how little I am leaving behind in this country, beside these neglected acres, which could draw me back again.”51
NINE
Back in the U.S.S.R.: 1944–1945
“I AM STILL ENTIRELY IN THE DARK ABOUT WHAT THE STATE DEPARTMENT will assign me to next,” George wrote Gene Hotchkiss from the farm in mid-April 1944. But he added: “I suspect that it will be Moscow; and if it is I am inclined to accept it and go. I spent so many years on Russia that I don’t want them to be wasted. And I feel that . . . I must live there once more, before I retire from this form of life.” Kennan’s appointment as counselor, the second-ranking position in the U.S. Embassy to the Soviet Union, came through on May 22. It had been in the works long before that.1
W. Averell Harriman, the American ambassador since October 1943, was as remarkable as his predecessor, Bill Bullitt. The son of the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman—whose biographer, curiously, had been the first George Kennan—young Averell was a Union Pacific shareholder while still a Yale undergraduate and rowing coach. He became a company vice president at the age of twenty-four, five years later founded the bank that became Brown Brothers Harriman, and by the mid-1920s was running one of the first foreign mining concessions in the U.S.S.R. An avid skier, polo player, and racehorse breeder, Harriman was also a high-level fixer, which is why Roosevelt made him Lend-Lease administrator to Great Britain in 1941. There he formed a close friendship with Winston Churchill and an even closer one with the prime minister’s daughter-in-law Pamela, who became his lover and, when he was seventy-nine, his third wife. With aid to Britain flowing smoothly after two years, FDR persuaded the reluctant Harriman to take the even more demanding job in Moscow. Like Bullitt a decade earlier, the new ambassador was determined to have good help.2
“Before I went to Moscow,” he remembered, “I investigated who were the two best Russian experts. They were George Kennan and Chip Bohlen.” But Kennan was handling the Azores bases negotiations, and Bohlen—then head of the State Department’s Soviet desk—was becoming indispensable to Roosevelt as a policy coordinator and Russian-language interpreter. The president therefore promised Harriman, at the Tehran conference in November, that Moscow would be Kennan’s next post. Characteristically, though, he failed to tell the State Department, which instead sent Kennan to London to work on the European Advisory Commission. It took until mid-January 1944 to sort out the confusion, by which time Kennan’s ulcers had made it too risky to send him back to the city that had first provoked them.3
Kennan’s “rest” at the farm brought a rapid recovery, however, and in May Bohlen arranged for him to meet Harriman—a fellow ulcer sufferer—in Washington. The two hit it off immediately, agreeing that Kennan would run the civilian side of the Moscow embassy. Harriman knew of Kennan’s objections to Roosevelt’s policies, but these did not bother him. Secure in his access to the president, self-confident enough to respect expertise he did not have, Harriman appreciated Kennan’s candor: “I never considered a difference of opinion as something objectionable. It was something that I expected, and hoped for, to bring out the facts and establish a sound judgment.”
“Averell Harriman was an operator,” Kennan recalled. “He had a direct line to Stalin, which he thought was the only important thing. I don’t think he attached great importance to our analyses of Russian society.” But by encouraging his counselor to provide real counsel, Harriman gave Kennan the freedom to speak his mind without risking his career, as he had had to do in Portugal and on the EAC. Kennan used the opportunity to mount a sustained assault on Roosevelt’s approach to the Soviet Union.
Most of Kennan’s criticisms remained within the precincts of Spaso House and the Mokhovaya, although Harriman occasionally passed sanitized versions to Washington: “I would change the telegrams he’d drafted, and that sometimes upset him.” Kennan had little sense at the time of whether his “anxious Need-lings” were getting through to his boss. Harriman’s own views on the U.S.S.R. were changing, though, and Kennan helped him find his way. He became, in turn, Kennan’s channel to the highest levels of the American government. Through his official actions Harriman showed, Kennan later acknowledged, that he had not been oblivious to what “caused me such concern.” This was, he was sure, a better way for Harriman to indicate agreement “than by verbally holding, so to speak, my intellectual hand.”
Kennan regarded Harriman as “a towering figure on our Moscow scene, outwardly unassuming but nevertheless commanding in appearance, without petty vanity, intensely serious but never histrionic . . . , imperious only when things or people impeded the performance of his duties. The United States has never had a more faithful public servant.” Of Kennan, Harriman said simply: “I’ve never been able to work with anyone as closely as I did with him.”4
I.
The journey from East Berlin (Pennsylvania) to Moscow required the entire month of June 1944, partly because wartime travel was complicated, but also because the State Department allowed George to stop off in Lisbon to see his family. While he was there, the D-Day landings took place, a long-awaited military breakthrough that made it possible to begin implementing the postwar planning he had witnessed—and worried about—in London and Washington. In response to a request from Henry Norweb, the new minister to Portugal, Kennan laid out the implications for the Lisbon legation staff, making no effort to conceal his qualms.
There was no doubting the heroism or the fighting ability of the men sacrificing their lives for faith “in the ultimate righteousness of our society and in the wisdom of those who lead it.” Americans at home had organized
