George F. Kennan: An American Life (103 page)

Kennan had not sought this visibility. He had participated in no public protests against the war, he assured a former State Department colleague, not even university teach-ins. But he had felt it necessary, when asked by Fulbright, to make his views known. The response astonished him: “It was perfectly tremendous. I hadn’t expected anything remotely like this.” One woman wrote to say that when his testimony began, she had been ironing: “I ironed all day.” She was not alone. CBS might have thought that the typical opinion maker didn’t watch daytime television, humorist Art Buchwald wrote, “but in my house it happens to be my wife.”

One poll, shown to Johnson, revealed support for his handling of the war dropping from 63 to 49 percent in the single month that followed the Senate hearings. More than any other episode in Kennan’s career, this one confirmed his long-standing belief that style was as important as substance. After seeing them on television, nobody could dismiss Kennan or Gavin as “irresponsible students or wild-eyed radicals,” Fulbright’s biographer has written. Their testimony “made it respectable to question, if not to oppose, the war.”
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On the Sunday after he testified, Kennan gave the chapel sermon at Princeton University. His theme was “Why Do I Hope?” There were many reasons not to: the state of the world, the fallibility of human nature, the frailties of the human frame. And yet:

There was hope, then, in simply struggling, against whatever odds: “Churchill taught us that, in 1940.” There was hope in “this marvelous earth around us.” There was hope in professional dedication, which “like some gigantic spiritual ski-lift” overcame “the abysses of our true loneliness and helplessness.” But the strongest reason for hope was love:

No act of love, he was sure, “will not ultimately be given its true value in the settlement of the affairs of the human spirit—in ways, perhaps, that defy our powers of imagination, but fully and in such a way to make it a thousand times worthwhile.”
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“Dearest Annelise,” George wrote her from Geneva, where he had been lecturing at the Graduate Institute of International Relations, on May 5, 1965. “I have been thinking constantly about ourselves and our future.... I thought it might be easier to write some of this to you than to say it when I get home.” They were approaching

There would be “more of Princeton, and more of the loneliness of the Institute,” but this would raise problems. “We’ll have to dream up something, I think, to prevent a complete drying-up of my personality . . . , and to make our life and home sufficiently interesting to hold some attraction for the children—as well as for ourselves.” It wouldn’t be easy, “for our taste in people and in recreations is not always the same.” Annelise’s reply, if she wrote one, is not on record, but the issue was one of which they were both aware. Marriages, like life, go through stages. Some survive the transitions; others don’t. How this happens is often a mystery, since few couples document—and fewer outsiders witness—the inner workings of an intimate relationship.
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Of their love there can be no doubt: the marriage could not otherwise have lasted for as long as it did. How two people love, though, is—as George’s letter gently suggested—not always the same. “I think they must have had a lot of hard times with each other,” a close friend surmised. George acknowledged as much—also gently—in his Princeton chapel sermon: “The path of true love indeed never does run smooth, [given] the inevitability of jealousies, of unrequited affections, of separations and bereavements.”

He had known, as a young man, that he must marry, but he also dreaded the prospect. “[O]nce married,” George informed Jeanette before he had even met Annelise, “very few men ever think at all any more.” Annelise wasn’t his equal as a thinker and never tried to be. “I wonder what it’s going to be like, living here with all these great brains,” she teased Oppenheimer, on the day they were introduced in the spring of 1950. She had been living with George for a long time by then, though, and his brain was still functioning. Some other wife, facing his slides into self-absorption, might have given up on him, Jeanette speculated. But “Annelise would make him go out and buy her a birthday present! She wouldn’t sit and sulk.” She was, George’s older sister Constance observed, totally unlike him, and therefore “[s]he couldn’t have been a better wife for him.”
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Annelise’s resilience, their neighbor Dick Dilworth thought, reflected her Scandinavian origins: an American would not have had the patience. Another Princeton friend, Bill Bundy, admired her skill in getting George to relax: “One has seen matrimonial relations where you feel that it’s too jangly, because they’re both trying to show off to each other.” Annelise had been a Washington wife when Mary Bundy first encountered her: “You talk about your husband. It’s tedious beyond measure.” In Princeton, though, “I began to see the other side, and to think she was just wonderful.” But George might have found Annelise “a little boring at times,” even there.
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“George is more apt to talk about himself with women than with men,” Annelise herself acknowledged. “Much more so.” Shrewdly, she used the plural. She could always discuss with him where to live and travel, what they could afford, and how to raise the children. But George never wrote her the kind of long, self-revelatory letters he sent to Jeanette. Annelise had seen some, and they made it appear “as if he were having absolutely the worst time. I knew it wasn’t like this. I can’t explain to you why always when he took pen in hand—” “Gloom and depression would set in?” “Yes.”
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Dorothy Fosdick, with whom Kennan shared his troubles when they served together on the Policy Planning Staff, attributed his need to confide in women to “deep psychological considerations.” Annelise agreed, pointing out that the loss of George’s mother, and then of Cousin Grace after his father remarried, had changed “his whole feeling about women.” George went even further: his relations with women, he wrote when he was seventy-seven, had been “unfortunately affected by the bewildering succession of female figures who flitted in and out of the house, each taking care of me in her way, through the years of my infancy and childhood.”
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The stability of a long marriage never quite balanced this instability in his upbringing; hence his dependence on Jeanette, as well as on a succession of female friends from whom George sought solace, to one degree or another, at one time or another: Frieda Por, Dorothy Hessman, Juli Zapolskaya, Fosdick herself. Others—more secretly—became lovers in times of loneliness, lapses George explained in Freudian terms without absolving himself of Calvinist guilt.

The best you could do, when afflicted by such “emotional and instinctual chaos,” was “to learn to act as though you weren’t.” But concealment too had its price: “There’s no use pretending that it’s anything other than what it is.”
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That’s why he used Russian, at times, to chronicle concealments. “I am ringing her up,” George wrote under an English-language entry in his diary on February 14, 1965. “No one is answering. I am calling again. She has picked up but I can hear in the tone of her voice that she is not alone. Embarrassed, I am ending the conversation. I am absolutely devastated and driving home.” Similar passages stretched across the bottom of pages for the next three months. They were to be understood, he explained to himself and to whoever would later read them, as “a story or novel based on fantasies flowing from my own life, representing its [switching back to English]
fictional extension
.” A few of these entries, however, also recounted dreams. “Enticing opportunities of getting intimate with particular women,” he wrote of one, “which don’t materialize because of the presence—the watchful presence—of my wife.”
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He even left instructions for his son, not to be passed on “until I am dead,” on how to manage such matters. Marriage could indeed provide “the deepest moments of happiness a man is capable of experiencing and the best conceivable background for the great constructive tasks of life.” But not all marriages were successful, and even those that were did not always fully satisfy “the sexual instinct,” second only to self-preservation in the demands that it made. So what about affairs? If conducted openly, the woman would become possessive, in an effort to demonstrate “her proprietary rights and the security of her status.” If clandestine, the affair risked becoming “the source of endless gnawing shame and apprehension.” If the woman was not married, “you may be fairly sure she wants to be, or will at some point want to be.” If she was married, there was always the possibility “of a sudden and unwanted intimacy with her husband.” If asked which was worse, “the friendship of an unsuspecting husband, or the resentment of a discerning one, I should not be able to tell you. God save you from them both.”
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Domesticity, George griped in another “imaginary” letter, was “children, diapers, illnesses, relatives, tiresome questions of money, [and] the sex-destroying question: ‘Have you remembered the key?’ ” He ought to be able to stroll, “sometimes alone, sometimes in company, through shady
allées
. There should be just enough of the female sex to ease the mind, not enough to destroy it. Can one have these things in Princeton?” He was not sure. It would require

Tragic indeed—until one notes that George began this last diary entry in the transit lounge at the London airport and completed it hours later as his plane was landing in New York: air travel almost always drove him, with pen in hand, into sloughs of despond. During the three weeks he had been away on this trip, he had sent Annelise an affectionate letter every other day. “It will be good to get home,” the last of them ended. “Love, G.”
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George led multiple lives through most of their marriage, and Annelise knew that he did. What these were when—which were real, which imagined, which dreamt—is harder to establish and doesn’t much matter. He was hardly alone, in this respect, among his contemporaries. He was unusual in taking responsibility for these affairs, whatever their nature, and in leaving behind an account of what they cost. He would hardly have done so had they not filled a void, the origins of which lay further in the past than he could remember. Annelise, missing little, understood much. George, in turn, understood how much greater his emptiness would have been without her.

“Received this morning the proofs of some portrait photos I had taken for publicity purposes,” George wrote one day in January 1965, “and was so appalled at the hideousness of my own visage that I went off . . . to the library and worked alone there, that others might be spared the ordeal of looking at me.” So how could he expect female companionship to ease the mind if the body was so visibly advancing beyond middle age? In fact, it seemed to help.

“He’s adorable,” the journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn had written another of George’s admirers a few months earlier: “so naïve really, so gentle, so conscience eaten that he feels he ought to suffer every minute for the US.” Gellhorn had not been so smitten when she stormed into the Prague legation in the fall of 1938, demanding that a younger Kennan “
do
something” about the German takeover of the Sudetenland. Now, though, she found him charming and began a passionate but one-sided correspondence about their mutual detestation of the war in Vietnam. George saw her less frequently than she wished and responded laconically to her letters: “What, you ask, does the private citizen do? If he is capable of it, I think he prays.”
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